If most of your members are in school what steps do you guys take to try to attract new members that are out of school - and have graduated? Is it hard to attract non-student members or is it easy?

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Virtual Pet Sites - Myspace Editors-web games

I think it just depends on your niche. Some forums thrive on the student traffic while others are filled with a more adult crowd, and some are mixed. I think having good search engine traffic would help with attracting a wider audience rather than only students.

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I have good search engine traffic so far but not as good as I expect it to be - but I'm working on it. I'm trying to rank #1 on one of the biggest keywords in my niche (going well so far). The fact is most of my students are in school - and activity isn't so good right now.

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Virtual Pet Sites - Myspace Editors-web games

I'm assuming you are talking about the Virtual Pets site. Clearly the majority of those using VP's are going to be inschool, but there are other aspects of the niche that your site doesn't explore too deeply that could potentially bring in additional traffic.

Specifically I am thinking about the business of Virtual Pets. It might be of interest to other readers (and hopefully members) to learn about how the sites fare in terms of business. If you can interview people involved in the big sites you might even be able to get inbound links from those sites to yours to point to the interviews.

Another aspect of virtual pets that might attract other people is the nuts and bolts programming. You have a strong showing in this, but I wonder if there might be ways of gaining traffic. What comes to mind is tutorials or a basic "how to" design guide for wannabe VP programmers.

Just a couple ideas...

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Good idea. A good friend of and I are exploring the business now - he's looking into reselling domains and such; my other partner and I know all the advertising networks to use and such as well. We're working on interviews too.

I'll have to talk to the programmers.

Great ideas!

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Virtual Pet Sites - Myspace Editors-web games

I have been having this problem since I first started out last year. I had decent traffic over the summer months, and every fall I end up with low traffic ratings because people go to school. I even worked with my school to help keep my site off the block list.

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I don't know if it would possible to attract non-student members to your site because of what its about, you may get some more members by adding more adult related content but they won't really contribute to the forum itself they will just be there for the tutorial content.

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What do you do to your community during the school months?

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Virtual Pet Sites - Myspace Editors-web games